Trump’s Great AchievementNEWS | 11 October 2025The Trump administration’s assault on America’s constitutional, legal, and normative order is so extensive and fear-inducing that many otherwise-sober observers find it hard to admit the things the president does right. And although they may grudgingly acknowledge his gifts as a demagogue or political manipulator, they cannot grant him any aspect of the statesman. In this they are wrong, and the first steps toward peace in Gaza show why—he has achieved a remarkable success and deserves full credit for it.
The logic of this dreadful war, which began with the massacres, rapes, and kidnappings of October 7, 2023—launched by Hamas but abetted by many others in Gaza who surged through the holes in the fence and cheered the truckloads of brutalized Israelis coming back—always pointed in the direction of some kind of cease-fire. Like many parties to aggressive war, Hamas has had to change its theory of victory. It began with the hope of catalyzing a war that would destroy the state of Israel, with Hezbollah, Iran, and others promptly joining in the assault, but when that support failed to materialize, it switched its aim to fatally weakening the Jewish state by bleeding it, exacerbating its domestic divisions, and isolating it internationally.
It achieved all three of those objectives. Israel has taken thousands of killed and wounded in this war, seen embittered internal political arguments, and received mounting hostility from European states, in particular. But none of those things did, or ever could, bring Israel to its knees, or reduce its determination to destroy those responsible for the unprovoked murders of 1,200 of its citizens and the kidnapping of 250 more.
For Israel, frustration with one of the longest wars in its history and anguish over the fate of the remaining living hostages were bound to push the government toward some kind of deal. Israel is willing to fight but is visibly war-weary. Its reserve army is sending men and women with careers and families back for fourth and fifth tours of urban fighting. It has been dismayed by the wave of anti-Semitism coursing through the streets of London and some campuses in America, and it grieves for hostages whose pictures greet arrivals at Ben Gurion Airport and are affixed to taxi stands, street-food shops, and apartment buildings.
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But to actually bring this war to a conclusion will be, nonetheless, no mean feat. Hamas is not a normal enemy. Rather, like al-Qaeda or the Islamic State, it is a fanatical religio-political movement, which makes a cult of martyrdom. It does not care for the welfare of ordinary Gazans; it has excluded them from its tunnels, built arsenals beneath their hospitals and schools, and ruled them with a savage brutality. Indeed, from the point of view of Hamas’s leadership, the more Gazans (and, broadly, Palestinians) suffer, the better.
Nor has Israel been all that easy to bring to the table. The right wing of the current coalition has fantasies of driving out the population of Gaza, annexing it, and settling it, and views any agreement as a compromise of fundamental principles. For Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, this is the beginning of the political end. This deal will probably shatter his coalition sooner rather than later and bring closer the day when he faces the reckoning that he has dreaded and thus far avoided for the political and strategic errors that set the conditions for the comprehensive failures of October 7.
Donald Trump’s contribution here is not just the last-minute arm-twisting and wheeling and dealing. It is, rather, a visceral appreciation of the dynamics of this war. Having no deep stock of empathy for Gaza and none for Hamas, he was more than willing to let Israel wreak havoc there, breaking Hamas’s will and the endurance of the population of Gaza. When Israel launched an attack on Qatar he tut-tutted, but he did not object too strenuously—that response softened both the Qataris (who have been Hamas’s paymasters and propagandists) and even Hamas leaders. Like other recent American presidents, he discovered that Netanyahu is a slippery, often deceitful counterpart, and he did not mind brutalizing him a bit as well. He understood too that, because of both elements of this policy, he is now the most popular politician in Israel. If he can bring the hostages home, he will be truly loved there.
Trump understood the fundamental realities of this war in a way that the posturing leaders of many other countries did not. Those politicians who chose this moment to recognize a Palestinian state—the prime minister of Canada, as his country knuckled under to American economic demands; the prime minister of Great Britain, as Jewish communities there suffered attacks (including murder) unseen in modern times; the president of France, as his own government collapsed—were irresponsible. All they did was harden Israel’s contempt for their politics of meaningless gesture. After all, they chose to recognize a state without borders, statal institutions, or a legitimate government—the Palestinian Authority has not had elections in two decades. Mark Carney, Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron, and their ilk have displayed zero willingness or ability to take real human or financial risks to bring peace, and the Israelis know it.
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The Americans, by contrast, saw that hope rested in Hamas being the isolated party, its remaining leadership in Gaza fearing extermination by the Israeli army, its external leadership realizing that it, too, can be killed. American emissaries worked quietly with Arab states whose hatred of Hamas is less well known but almost as virulent as Israel’s.
Trump has recognized that the favorite solution of all would-be truce makers in the Middle East, status quo ante, is impossible. Perhaps it is the developer in him, but he saw more clearly than any diplomat that Gaza is so thoroughly ruined that an entirely new dispensation is needed. And his 20-point plan, with its arrangements for supervision of rebuilding by an American-led board, addresses that.
It may all fall apart, of course. Hamas’s junior leaders may prefer to die now in the ruins of Gaza than five years from now from an assassin’s bullet, or, as accomplished cheaters, they may hope to hold a few live hostages or dead bodies back as leverage. The complicated arrangements of Trump’s plan may fall apart. The deeper issues of Israeli and Palestinian co-existence, and of the bursting open of sewers of Jew hatred around the world, remain to be confronted.
But for now, the war will come, if not to a definitive end, to a truce that offers relief to the population of Gaza and the desperate families of Israeli hostages, and that is to be welcomed unreservedly.
Even as Trump threatens war on American cities, he is, sincerely, someone who thinks of himself as a peacemaker. He has had some real, if little-noticed, successes in this term—for example, the Armenia-Azerbaijan negotiations. He mishandled the diplomacy around the Russia-Ukraine war, but there can be little doubt that he wants to see it ended, and not simply with Russian tanks rolling into Kyiv. He deserves credit for helping midwife the Abraham Accords in his first term. In all of these cases, other parties—particularly those who were the principals in the negotiations—played crucial and sometimes unacknowledged roles. But they would not have succeeded without Trump.
We can only speculate about this seeming altruism from someone who seems to lack that quality in most of the rest of his life. Perhaps it is his reckoning with his own mortality or his craving for legacy as a historical figure; perhaps it is mere hunger for a fancy ribbon from the Nobel Peace Prize committee. His motivations, however, do not matter—the results do. If he pulls this one off, he may be a scoundrel, but he will deserve that gala night in Oslo, and considerably more so than some of the others who have had the same honor.Author: Eliot A. Cohen. Source
